Page 5 of The Duke Decides

Louisa went, but she did not feel lighter. She could not like the idea of letting her fate rest in the hands of a stranger, whether a friend to the Duchess or no. She only hoped the man the Duchess had in mind would prove a gentleman. Louisa was too old to hope a knight in shining armor would come to her aid, even if such men existed.

Chapter Two

Gabriel Declan woke to the undeniable knowledge that, as he teetered on the edge of his thirtieth year, it was high time he changed his style of life.

“Hell’s teeth,” he called to the demon pounding on the door to his bedchamber in the wee reaches of the night. “The building had better be afire.”

“It’d be just your luck if it were.”

Gabriel’s closest friend, sometime valet, and under steward of the Barkham estates, Orde, entered the room with a long dark cloth draped over one arm and a tray bearing a small glass of murky substance in his hands. “It’s ten of the clock, milord, and you have a caller.”

Gabriel rolled onto his back, throwing an arm over his eyes as Orde set down his assorted items, strode to the tall narrow windows, and pulled back the draperies. The dim London light struggled in, already cloudy with the morning fires being lit across the great and mighty city.

“I’m still Gabe to you, and always will be,” he growled. “And who calls at the ghastly hour of ten in the morning? Decent folk are still in their beds.”

“And indecent ones, such as you.” Orde clanged unnecessarily as he poked at the ash in the grate, located the chamberstick he had used to light Gabe to his rooms not so many hours before, and poured water from the pitcher into the washbasin.

His face paled as Gabe stirred and threw off the covers, but he kept the aplomb that had seen him through many a scrape, fright, and scrabble at Gabe’s side. “Will you tell me now how you earned that wound on your head?”

Gabe probed the knot above his right ear and winced. “I think Fenton tried to kill me again.”

“Tried? I think he succeeded.” Orde held out the banyan for Gabe to step into, then kicked forward his slippers.

“His luck if he does. He’ll inherit Barkham. All the estates, properties, rents, tithes, annuities, pensions, and debts. Every angry tenant, broken fence, and exhausted acre of land.”

Gabe moved to the basin and bent to splash his face, wincing again as he found another bruise. He’d taken a right beating, and if he wasn’t mistaken, that agonizing pain shooting up his left side was the sign of a cracked rib.

“Anyone else would want Barkham, Gabe,” Orde said quietly. “It won’t take much to turn the ship around. A bit of good management, a few wise investments, some luck.”

“And we all know I possess that in spades.” Gabe mopped his face with the cloth, then examined his visage in the clouded, spotty glass. He pulled back his lips in a feral grin. Some discoloration, a scab above one eyebrow, but he still had all his teeth, praise be.

“Did he start a mill at the club?”

“No, only made his usual remarks about my unfitness and the unfortunate accident of my birth putting on a blot on the family tree, etcetera. The thugs found me outside Astley’s.”

“You deserve a thrashing if you’re going to continue to frequent low places,” Orde said severely. “You are a duke now. Milord.”

“Keep lording me, and I’ll plant you a facer.” Gabe sat in his chair and allowed Orde to place a warm cloth along his jaw. Despite his words, his friend was gentle around the swelling and bruises.

“If I could disinter Harry and thrash him for doing this to me, I would,” Gabe reflected. “To think. The man survives Zamora, Orthez, and the occupation of Paris, then dies of cholera while vacationing in St. Petersburg.”

“He didn’t do it to spite you, Gabe,” Orde said, removing the cloth and unfolding the razor.

“No, my mother did this to spite me. Keeps her silence to me and everyone while Harry is lively and likely to produce heirs, then springs the truth on us all the moment the ship returns from Russia with the remains of the 4th Duke of Barkham.”

“God rest his soul,” Orde added.

“God rot him,” Gabe exclaimed. “And her. A woman can’t tell her own son he’s the brat of a ducal throw? I thought Powlett was my father for the first thirteen years of my life, till she informs me I’m the sprig of a British soldier. And not just any soldier.” The sense of grievance grew every time he rehearsed the story, and it pleased him to feed his bitterness. “A Hussar, a colonel, and the second son of a duke, biding his time fighting the French and Muhammed Ali in Egypt until his family can get him some royal sinecure and set him up for life. Instead, he lets some Mameluke bayonet him and end all those hopes, and leaves the issue of a cousin with ducal aspirations.”

“Fenton the forgotten.” Orde shook his head.

“Fenton the slimy bastard. He’s performed some black magic, I don’t doubt, to kill Harry off before he can marry and produce an heir of his own. And when up I surface, when my dear darling mother of a sudden produces legal marriage lines, though the wedding took place outside of Europe, the court upholds them and her, and thinks they honor me by passing along the dukedom.”

“Most men would find it an honor,” Orde reflected. He had heard this tirade many a time in the past months, and made the same patient points. “Your father was a military hero. Powlett gave your mother shelter and a home and a man of the house after your father was killed. He brought her, and all of you, to England when he returned. He didn’t have to; he could have left you in Egypt. And it’s the younger ones that are the bastards, or were, since your mother married Powlett once they reached British shores.”

Gabe still felt a blade lance through him at the memory of the man he’d thought a father. Of his own actual father, provider of the Declan blood and now the ducal inheritance, Gabe had only portraits, sketches, and a sword and scabbard bearing the crest of the 8th King’s Royal Hussars, for whom Thomas Gabriel Henry Declan had fought and died.

“And it’s Fenton who still stands to inherit if I stick my spoon in the wall,” Gabe grumbled. “An event he seems determined to hasten with all possible speed.”